Rejection question

[LeighWestkaff]

Good afternoon....

I just received a rejection on my first submission (Choosing an Android Notepad Application). The feedback given was:

Please professionally format your articles in 12 pt. Times New Roman or Arial black font with single spaced paragraphs and a ***double space between paragraphs***. A full space between paragraphs helps the reader to determine where one paragraph ends and another begins. You should also observe this formatting rule for the content details section of the submission form.

I'm not surprised I got a rejection on my first try but I'm not sure where to go from here. I submitted with Arial 12 point, paragraphs were singled spaced with a double space between them. I was careful (I think!) to duplicate the spacing in the extracted portion. I'm wondering if perhaps the way I ended the extract, by placing an three dots at the cut off point was the issue? Or was it possibly the way the bullet list in the second paragraph was formatted? I did not include extra spacing between the bullet items or the transition sentence that followed the last bullet.

Technical notes: I'm a Mac user, writing with Scrivener and exporting to rtf, then checking formatting in Pages.

Any thoughts you may have would be helpful.

Thanks

[Celeste Stewart]

It's not unusual for word processors to add "padding" to give the illusion of line spacing between paragraphs rather than a real line between paragraphs. If you do not have to hit the enter key twice betweeen paragraphs, then this is the problem; it doesn't translate properly and the text looks like one gigantic paragraph.

I'm not familiar with the program you're using, so I can't tell you how to change the paragraph settings in that. You can manually enter a line for now and then explore the paragraph settings section of the word processor to see if there's an option to change them. For example, in Word, you would change the "before" and "after" spacing settings to 0 pt which removes the illusion and forces you to press the enter key twice.

[LeighWestkaff]

Thanks Celeste. I've taken that into account as well as some other suggestions I found re bullets in this forum and resubmitted the piece. We'll see what happens!

[LaLa]

Sorry this happened to you on your first submission, but it sounds like you have it all worked out. I hope your re-submission is approved.

I received the same rejection today. The font is my fault. I wrote it in GoogleDocs and forgot to correct the font before submitting. I saved it as a Word doc, however, and I'm not sure what happened with the spacing. I'm going to see if Celeste's reply will apply to my situation, too.

I'm pretty bummed right now, as I've been having minor computer issues lately and have decided not to submit anything else until my setup is right. Working in other word processing programs and saving as .doc isn't working for me at all. In more than 20 articles, I'd never received a rejection before the computer issues began. Since then, I've had 5 rejections and may have a 6th if the submission I have pending isn't approved. I'm sure the editors think I've lost my mind.

Again, hope your article is approved and I hope you'll continue to submit more. C-C is really a great place to hone your skills and to sell your articles. Just keep writing!

[Celeste Stewart]

LaLa, maybe try saving in .rtf format instead of .doc? It's a universal file format accepted here and it preserves formatting.

[LaLa]

Thanks, Celeste. I'll keep that in mind for the future. I'm honestly afraid to submit anything else though since I've already had so many back-to-back rejections for formatting. No one's said anything, but I feel like I'm on thin ice.

My main computer is fixed now. However, during the repair process Word was somehow lost and I never even had it on the one I'm working on now. By the end of today I hope to have it installed on both computers. Until then, I'm not submitting anything.

[LeighWestkaff]

I just wanted to thank the editors for the very helpful second rejection notice on my first submission. After taking that their feedback into account I corrected that article and tweaked the other two I already queued up. All three have been accepted now, so I guess it's time I get in gear and put some more words down.

Thanks